Amsterdam-based Nopan has raised 7.2 million euros to date, including a new round led by Newion with follow-on backing from Crane and Seedcamp, to build what its founders call a performance layer for account-to-account and wallet payments. Co-founder and CEO Konstantin Surkov and co-founder Nick Ryabov, both former members of Netflix’s payments team, built the company around a specific gap: launching an account or wallet payment method across European banks is straightforward, but making it perform reliably at scale is not. The funding will expand Nopan’s coverage of account and wallet payment methods across Europe and deepen its optimization tooling for digital businesses and payment service providers.
The reason this matters beyond one funding round is what it says about where the real cost sits in Europe’s push toward account-to-account payments. Initiatives like Wero and long-standing local wallet schemes have solved distribution, banks and consumers already have the rails. What they have not solved is consistency: as Surkov put it, “the real challenge is making it perform reliably across banks, customer behaviours, and processes.” That is an infrastructure problem, not a product one, and it is the same category of problem card networks spent decades solving before account-to-account payments existed as a checkout alternative.
The original insight is what this funding implies about market structure. A startup can now raise capital specifically to sell reliability as a standalone layer sitting between merchants and Europe’s patchwork of bank and wallet rails, rather than needing to own the payment method itself. That is the same unbundling dynamic already visible in Europe’s payment apps racing toward full banking status, where infrastructure gaps, not distribution, are becoming the layer investors will pay to close.
Source: Nopan
